Under the current EU budget, social spending through ESF+ amounts to nearly €96bn. According to internal calculations made by European Parliament services, total social spending could fall under the next MFF to between €63bn and €87bn.
Nearly 75 percent of the EU’s building stock is energy inefficient and most homes were never designed to cope with the increasingly hot summers Europe now faces.
All Europeans should read a speech Koen Lenaerts, president of the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg, delivered to law students in Leiden in mid-June, writes Caroline de Gruyter. It is a speech about European values and the fundamental place they occupy in Europe’s legal system.
The EU has left the door open to age-estimation by behavioural profiling, and the EU’s own data protection authorities have warned that this can be more intrusive than the verification it replaces, inferring age from a user’s activity at scale, with weaker accuracy for the children it is meant to protect.
A tribunal created for one conflict — while acts of aggression in the Middle East and Latin America go unanswered — serves the court’s critics their strongest argument on a silver platter: that international criminal justice is a selective instrument of Western power, not a universal principle.
Pakistani women and children pick cotton in bonded labour for a few euros a day while Europe’s biggest fashion brands exploit legal loopholes to keep their clothes and their consciences officially clean.
Presented as a transparency exercise, a draft European Parliament report would curb the Court of Justice’s power to defend judicial independence across the Union and with it the legal infrastructure on which the EU’s citizens, companies and rights depend, warns Alberto Alemanno.
Whether it’s Nigel Farage’s secret multi-million pound crypto donations, or Marine Le Pen’s corruption conviction, anything that catches the far-right out is, by default, against the will of the people.
![As birthrates decline and the workforce empties out, “in some countries, [people] are obliged to retire,”](https://static.euobserver.com/2005/04/677e4ac7c530bd9e00eb0ac007326e19.jpg)
The EU’s population is set to both shrink, age, and thus be short of workers, according to a new demographics study on Thursday.
Public procurement is quietly becoming one of EU’s industrial policy tools of choice. We are not the first to try this, and the evidence is sobering, warns Judith Arnal.
Extending the EU’s recovery and resilience funds (RRF) would add flexibility to the 2028–2034 EU budget negotiations, raise the chances of agreement before year’s end, and preserve EU leverage over reforms in Bulgaria, Hungary, and Romania at a sensitive moment.
According to the Portugal remigration summit’s official website, the meeting was about “shaping the future of Europe and the West through sovereignty, identity, and demographic renewal” – a euphemism of creating imagined racially pure Western societies.
Drawing on months of research and consultations with lawyers, trade experts and former and current EU officials, we propose a regulation under the EU’s Common Commercial Policy. Such regulation should aim at ensuring that EU trade complies with international law and does not help sustain the illegal settlements economically.
Exempt from transparency rules, the EU Commission’s new so-called “Reality Checks” consultations are often attended only by lobbyists yet have shaped major deregulation proposals. Now the EU Ombudsman wants answers.
As the conservative government bleeds popularity, Tsipras is testing whether a hybrid message of radical left economics and “patriotism” can redraw Greece’s political map before next year’s election.
What the Socialists, Liberals and Greens can no longer do is denounce the hard-right while sustaining the parliamentary machinery that gives it influence. Yet that is precisely what they have been doing since 2024, and the renewal of the European Parliament presidency is about to expose the contradiction.
In 2026, a woman worker in average working in the EU still earns 11.1 percent less her male counterpart. Not because she works less, or contributes less, but because the system has been carefully designed to keep her in the dark about it.
EU budget commissioner Piotr Serafin warned “the alternative to European spending is more national spending” – adding that defence, energy security and research “will have to be financed one way or another.”
Europe’s standing will not be restored by shifting responsibilities from one building to another, moving competences between commissioners and directorates-general, or publishing yet another security strategy.
From a mysterious diamond ring gift to a journalist being ejected after the ambassador called the police, the Brussels bash played out less like a birthday party and more like a meticulously stage-managed piece of Trump-era political theatre.